One big take away with the O'Donnell mess is that corroborating witnesses should be scrutinized.

[Drunken Irishman]

Christine O'Donnell's niece apparently had six people who were either told of the episode or claim to have witnessed it.

Had her niece not been so goddamn daft in the claim, and left it as vague as we've seen with Tara, how could anyone actually disprove it? That's the scary thing. If she had made the claim not specific to an event - or time - the possibility of refuting it would be difficult.

Then you have the corroborating witnesses, people who legit back her story up.

Except the story was a lie.

One witness, her aunt, Christine, said she was there when it happened. It's now been verifiably proven that the event didn't happen. She literally lied for her niece. The other supposed witnesses were told of the events and their story given legitimacy because of it.

And that really opens a new can of worms - how can you claim any corroborating evidence backs up an accuser's story?

Because if the accuser is lying, it reasons they also lied to the people who are claiming they were told of the story in the past.

How can you hang someone based on that? And why is Tara's story any more credible than Christine O'Donnell's niece's story due to her brother, and people in the past, corroborating based on something SHE told them?

We just saw with O'Donnell that corroborating witnesses are only as good as the accuser using them.

Which is why these false accusations are only damaging the #MeToo movement.

It's a bad situation overall but it's clear you can't insist Tara's credible because of the people who apparently corroborated her story - because we just saw with the niece accusation that it doesn't matter how many witnesses back you up - they, too, could be lying or they, too, could also have been lied to by the person making the accusations.

[The Magistrate]

1. A Point That Should Not Be Lost, Sir

It is an elementary rule of evidence that people cannot testify to something they did not witness.

If someone's testimony is that they were told something, their testimony is just that, that they were told something, and what they say they were told is not evidence what they were told is true.

In cases of sexual assault brought after a lapse of years since the alleged assault, that is what witnesses testify to; that they were told something. This may taken as evidence that the person who alleges assault called notice of it to people at the time, and of how that person called notice to it at the time, but that is all it is regarded as evidence of; that in some sense 'a hue and cry' was raised at the time by the person alleging an assault occurred long ago.

If several people say they were told something of the alleged incident, and their testimonies agree on what the person alleging assault said, their evidence amounts only to showing that the person alleging assault told a consistent story at a particular time in the past. That their accounts may agree is not in any sense evidence supporting the veracity of what they were told. Unfortunately, a coherent story agreeing in all details may be as easily be evidence of determined falsehood as of unvarnished truth.

[GeorgeGist]

2. Surely there's a fat paycheck for Tara et al.